Bring the Buzz to you.

The holiday season is upon us. And with it another season’s worth of dismay at how early it starts. One minute you’re sneaking your kids’ Halloween candy, and the next you’re face to face with Santa at the mall after some time warp transported you into the holidays nearly two months ahead of time. It’s enough to turn anyone into a Grinch. But pharmaceutical and med-tech companies could take a cue from retail in this instance, because the time to prepare for a product’s commercialization is not just two months – but at least two years – before FDA approval.

That’s right. At least two years to “seed the market” for your product’s success. Here are five PR insights about what that entails.

Shifting your mindset.

Research is what gets you to “the next big thing,” so understandably that’s where your focus has been. But preparing for commercialization requires you to move from that singular goal/singular audience mindset to more “multi-level thinking.” Who needs to know about us? Where do we need to be seen? What publications do we need to be in? Before the market can trust in your product,…

PRWeek paid tribute to six luminaries of the public relations industry by inducting them into the fourth class of the PRWeek Hall of Fame in a celebration at the Grand Hyatt in New York on December 5.

The 2016 honorees including Patrice Tanaka, co-founder of Patrice Tanaka & Company, Inc.; CRT/tanaka; and PadillaCRT, where she served as chief counselor and creative strategist. Patrice now serves as chief joy officer of Joyful Planet, a business and life strategy consultancy she recently founded.

For some observers, it’s an offensive situation as the costs of higher education skyrocket.

Here at the American Marketing Association’s annual Higher Education Symposium, the conversation started yesterday with a talk about Americans’ declining trust levels in government, business and media. The lack of trust in these institutions arguably gives colleges and universities greater trust to play an even larger role in addressing local, regional and national challenges.

But when obtaining a college degree typically saddles its earner with years of debt, excessive pay for administrators (and coaches!) undermines that trust. It creates a perception, fair or not, that institutions prioritize raising money, opening buildings and playing games over making college more accessible and affordable – a paramount issue for students and their families.

This year, I read three books on different themes in PR and took notes on some of the key takeaways. Enjoy these selections with a nice glass of wine (or tea) for some light weekend reading, if you’re so inclined.This is How You Pitch: How to Kick A** in Your First Years of PRBy: Ed Zitron

Overview: I read this book in two nights of skimming and highlighting while watching TV. Maybe multitasking is frowned upon, but I think it makes for a good PR pro…and so does Zitron. He goes over all the ways to make your media pitch worth an editor/reporter/producer’s time and he does it in a humorous way, highlighting some of his mishaps and experiences. The book is exactly what it sounds like – a step-by-step guide to pitching, but it is also great for setting expectations for your first years in PR.

Who should read: Any interns or assistant account executives not afraid of a few curse words and satire who want to impress their supervisors with some ~sweet~ pitching ideas.

As Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate tradition, I am starting my own Booze Bin tradition by posting my Second Annual “Football, Turkey & Craft Beer Post.” You’ve been waiting for this post all year, haven’t you? Of course you have, because Thanksgiving is awesome! We all know Thanksgiving Day is about bonding: with family, with friends, with food, with conversation, with sports, with fall and with booze. So let’s combine them all, and pair up our Thursday football games with delish beer and food choices, this time with some new recipes and new brews.

Game #1: Appetizer Pre-Game

According to the NFL, an average 28.4 million viewers watch football on Thanksgiving Day. And we all know that football and beer go hand in hand. That’s a lot of people, drinking a lot of beer. This year, the Minnesota Vikings will take on the Detroit Lions. Brrrrr, that sounds like a cold game. (Side note: Did you know that the Lions play EVERY Thanksgiving Day? Yep. Since 1934. Wondering why? Read the history here.) Food and beer-wise,…

The rise of mobile continues! Google has been slowly moving toward a mobile-first index for quite some time and they officially announced it on November 4th, 2016. It’s currently being tested and it is anticipated to fully roll-out in the next couple of months.

What exactly does Google’s mobile-first indexing mean?

In short, Google will crawl and index the mobile version of your site as its primary source for content and ranking signals for your site.

Google stated: “To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we’re going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.”

Mobile is even MORE important now.

More people than ever are living their lives on multiple screens. In fact, internet usage on mobile and tablet devices has…

Some alarming revelations were released by PadillaCRT client Allianz Life earlier this week—and chief among them, the fact that the incidence and financial impact of elder financial abuse may be worse than previously thought.

Allianz Life’s 2016 Safeguarding Our Seniors Study found that about 20 percent of family and friends reported knowing an elder who experienced financial abuse. Moreover, more than one-third of active caregivers (37 percent) said the elder they care for has experienced financial abuse or exploitation with a loss. Respondents also revealed that elder financial abuse is not an isolated occurrence, with a full 40 percent of all active and potential caregivers confirming that their elder has experienced financial abuse more than once.

Allianz Life’s survey noted the average financial loss to victims was $36,000, with nearly half of respondents saying the effect on the elder victim to be “major loss” or “financial ruin”—that’s serious and very real damage.

Equally troubling, nearly 90% of active and potential caregivers said they also experienced a financial impact from the abuse, with the average cost to them also reaching $36,000 – a direct result of having to compensate for their elder’s loss.

Gin is one spirit that is having its day across the globe. In the form of a Gin Tonic it has become a phenomena and is definitely one of the hottest and most fascinating trends out there. For those not familiar with gin, it is a neutral spirit with base ingredients including malt, corn, rye and/or molasses. However, it is the use of juniper and other botanicals (coriander seed, citrus peel, licorice root, fennel, etc.) that make gin unique from other neutral spirits like vodka. Each distiller has their own secret recipe that could include a few to multiple botanicals. The most common style is the London Dry, with a flavor based on junipers and citrus. Some of the best known gin brands fall in this style. Other styles you can find are Plymouth (the only gin with a protected designation of origin), Genever (the original gin invented in Holland in the 13th century and used originally as a medical remedy), and several others. Finally, the latest fad in gin is brown colored barrel-aged gin, that has attracted the attention of those into darker spirits like bourbon and whiskey drinkers.

One of the greatest challenges facing business today is communications. At face value, this can seem counter-intuitive. After all, it’s never been easier for a brand to get information out and into the hands of its consumers, influencers and the media.

More and more, however, businesses are discovering that getting the information out there isn’t the whole battle — in fact, it isn’t even close. We work to get our communications out in the wild, ready to consume, only to have it too often fall on deaf ears, or more accurately, on distracted eyes.

The more important battle is the battle of relevance to the audience, a battle that includes every other piece of content and an equation, which is made up of many things including medium, message and context. If we don’t get relevance right, our actions simply won’t get rewarded with attention.

It’s no surprise that the communications industry is transforming. We’re at a classic Andy Grove inflection point where the old strategic picture dissolves, giving way to the new. As new channels come into being every day, the communications landscape changes and so too must our strategies and plans.

How better to close out Election Week 2016 than with a handful of other mind-blowing declarations? This is *not* a political post, but an analysis of how the election will or will not affect holiday spending trends. For the past couple of weeks, anxious consumers have been inundated with campaign messaging and post-election chatter when they might otherwise have been focused on their holiday shopping lists.

Over the course of the past couple of months, many brands were tempted to use this timely topic to their advantage, while others stayed far, far away to be mindful of sensitivities and avoid overstepping non-partisan boundaries. Regardless of which tactic was employed, it was difficult for marketers to get a word in edgewise, and now many wonder how holiday spending will suffer.

Myth #1: The Election Has Totally Destroyed Holiday Spending

It’s no secret that our minds, bodies and souls have been elsewhere for the past several weeks, but holiday spending has not yet been lost to the election cycle. Delayed, sure, but not destroyed. The “Christmas creep,” marketing speak for the persistent expansion of the holiday shopping season, may have been put on pause, but it will return in full